Playing soccer with humanoid robots

As step towards the long-term goal of winning against the FIFA world champion, the RoboCup Federation added in 2002 a league for humanoid robots to its annual soccer competitions. Now, the young Humanoid League raised the bar again. After preliminary competitions, for the first time, soccer games with humanoid robots were played in 2005. This article describes the technology of the humanoid soccer robots, explains the rules of the league, and gives an outlook to the research issues that must be addressed in the future.